Location-tracking turns your smartphone into your stalker

Privacy experts say all mobile users should disable location tracking unless they are actively using an app, like a map program giving them directions. "I generally disable location services except for specific apps at specific moments, such as I'm trying to use Google maps to find a specific place," said Hanni M. Fakhoury, a staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF).

State agencies in California are collecting and using more data now than they ever, and much of this data includes very personal information about California residents. This presents a challenge for agencies and the courts—how to make government-held data that’s indisputably of...

Sharing your personal fitness goals—lowered heart rates, accurate calorie counts, jogging times, and GPS paths—sounds like a fun, competitive feature offered by today’s digital fitness trackers, but a recent report from The Washington Post highlights how this same feature might end up revealing not just where you are, where...

Protecting the highly personal location data stored on or generated by digital devices is one of the 21st century’s most important privacy issues. In 2017, the Supreme Court finally took on the question of how law enforcement can get ahold of this sensitive information. Whenever you use a cell phone...

Federal courts must end the excessive secrecy surrounding law enforcement surveillance orders, a U.S. Senator urged in a letter on Friday. This secrecy block’s the public’s ability to fully understand how police conduct this surveillance, the lawmaker wrote. The letter, sent by Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Or), asks federal courts...

EFF Senior Staff Attorney Jennifer Lynch and Investigative Researcher Dave Maass last night received the First Amendment Coalition’s 2017 Free Speech & Open Government Award in recognition for their work bringing transparency and accountability to law enforcement’s collection and use of automated license plate...

Step onto any city street and you may find yourself subject to numerous forms of police surveillance—many imperceptible to the human eye.A cruiser equipped with automated license plate readers (also known as ALPRs) may have just logged where you parked your car. A cell-site simulator may be capturing your cell-phone...

Law enforcement officers in Washington, D.C. violated the Fourth Amendment when they used a cell site simulator to locate a suspect without a warrant, a D.C. appeals court ruled on Thursday. The court thus found that the resulting evidence should have been excluded from trial and overturned the defendant’s...

Now that California’s Broadband Privacy Bill, A.B. 375, is headed for a final vote in the California legislature, Comcast, Verizon, and all their allies are pulling out all the stops to try to convince state legislators to vote against the bill. Unfortunately, that includes telling legislators about made-up problems the...

San Francisco, California—The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and the ACLU won a decision by the California Supreme Court that the license plate data of millions of law-abiding drivers, collected indiscriminately by police across the state, are not “investigative records” that law enforcement can keep secret. California’s highest court...